With a focus on painting’s intersections with cinema, photography and music, Rachel Lancaster edits and translates photographic ‘stills’ into oil paintings, from found moving imagery and her own photographs. She depicts detailed fragments divorced from greater narratives, rendering these fragments both descriptive and abstract, suspenseful and open-ended. Within this, her strategic use of ambiguity creates resonant pauses, allowing emotional undercurrents to come forth and find resolve. 

‘Ponytail’ is an unconventional female portrait, a recurring device in Lancaster’s work. Characteristically, Lancaster subverts our expectations by concealing her subject’s face, the portrait’s central fact; her subject dominates the foreground, yet her back is turned, her head blending into the darkness of the background. Lancaster turns both her and our attention to generally secondary details – the ponytail band (tonally echoing the door frame, creating a sense of cohesion), the way her hair falls upon her shirt. Playfully, self-consciously, Lancaster invites us to search for coded meanings, narrative and identity in unfamiliar places – in details that are often overlooked.

Rachel Lancaster

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Rachel Lancaster